Restaurants under siege

Owners of restaurants across Staten Island are getting fed up with the city Department of Health over its appetite for collecting fines. Enough is enough, they say, and it’s not hard to understand why.

Their justifiable complaints — echoing those of eateries citywide — have to do with the flawed system of letter grades being enforced by relentless inspectors.

It goes far beyond the need to ensure safe dining for restaurant-goers. As we have said before, it looks suspiciously like the city is using the inspection system to cash in at the expense of restaurants that are under its thumb.

“It’s a common theme, these overzealous inspections,” said Linda Baran, president of the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce. “It’s at the point where businesses are saying these fines and fees hamstring them.”

So much so that the City Council is to hold hearings in the next several weeks on the growing crisis.

Calling it a sign “we’ve hit a raw nerve,” Speaker Christine Quinn has noted that over 1,000 restaurant owners have responded to a survey by the Council in advance of the hearing. The Island’s Chamber of Commerce has urged its 55 restaurant members to join in.

Since 2010, the Health Department has required food-service establishments to post letter grades of A, B or C that reflect their cumulative scores on sanitary inspections.

But the nitpicking inspections, purportedly performed to ensure food safety, have, at the hands of some bullies working as inspectors, turned into dogged searches for picayune technical violations that have nothing to do with consumer health.

The explanation for this hyper-vigilance is that all violations, serious or not, carry steep fines that are often all out of proportion to any supposed risk. And somehow, successive inspections by the same inspectors seem to turn up entirely new lists of petty offenses that generate new fines.

¦Critics insist that this increasingly harsh enforcement has as much to do with fine revenue as safety and the numbers bear out their charge. The Department of Health hauled in over $42 million in fines in fiscal 2011, more than twice the amount it collected back in 2005.

In fiscal 2011, restaurant fines increased nearly $10 million (or almost 25 percent) from the year before.

Why the sharp increase in fine revenue? Have restaurants become that much dirtier?

This isn’t the first time we’ve asked the question.

“It’s like they’re printing money and we’re the printing press. Soon they’re going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg,” James McBratney, head of the Staten Island Restaurant and Tavern Association, has said. “They are doing this entirely under the guise of protecting the public health and it’s a farce; their true mission is to raise money.”

Mr. McBratney and others in his 100-plus member association say the outcome of health inspections can differ wildly, sometimes depending how rules are interpreted, the extent of the review or even the mood of the inspector.

The fact is, restaurants on Staten Island have fared the best of all boroughs under the vague and largely useless letter grading system. Nearly 79 percent of the more than 700 restaurants here have been able to earn an “A” rating.

Yet the situation remains dire citywide.

Health inspectors shuttered over 

1,500 restaurants at one point or another during fiscal 2011, a rise of more than 17 percent from the year before. They include several popular and reputable eateries on Staten Island, affecting owners, employees, their families and all the businesses that provide goods and services to these restaurants.

Sure, some of these 1,500 places were sloppy and deserved their fate, but how many of these establishments became casualties simply because they were targeted by overzealous martinets in the employ of the Department of Health?

The City Council is right to intervene before the situation gets even worse.